ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET), a protocol designed to secure bank card transactions initiated on open networks. SET was sponsored jointly by Visa and MasterCard in collaboration with important players in business software such as IBM, GTE, Microsoft, Science Applications International Corporation, Terisa Systems, and VeriSign. SET secures bank card transactions over the Internet. SET also provides a secure interface to the banking infrastructure for authorization and remote payment. SET is a transaction-oriented protocol that operates in a request/response mode; that is, messages are paired. SET secures the exchanges between the client and the merchant and the exchanges between the merchant and the payment gateway. SET uses the digital signature of the sender to ensure message integrity, that is, the digest of the message encrypted with the private key of the sender. The identification of the participants in a SET transaction corresponds to a preestablished relation between an encryption key and an entity.
